Heiress's Defiance (Mills & Boon M&B) (The Chatsfield - Book 8) by Harris Lynn Raye

Author:Harris, Lynn Raye [Harris, Lynn Raye]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472095954
Publisher: Mills & Boon Series
Published: 2014-04-30T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

LUCILLA COULD NOT believe what she’d just been told. Her stomach roiled in fury and pain. The triumph she’d expected to feel was strangely absent. She’d wanted to find out something about Christos, something to make him go away—but she hadn’t expected this.

He stood there so tall and remote and angry, his eyes flashing hot. He was not in the least bit cowed—and had she really expected he would be?

“I don’t know what you think you know about me, Lucilla mou, but there is nothing you can say that will make me quit.”

She sucked in a pained breath. He’d been in her bed last night. He’d been a tender and amazing lover, both giving and demanding. He’d coaxed responses from her body that had stunned her. Responses she wanted to experience again and again.

But he wasn’t who she thought he was. He was not the cool, urbane man of mystery he pretended to be. He was a violent criminal. Or had been.

“You nearly killed a man,” she said, her throat tight. “Your own father.”

His face morphed into a cold mask. His eyes gave nothing away. They were curiously blank, and somehow that hurt far more than if he’d stayed angry or become suddenly remorseful. If he’d broken down and said how he’d made a youthful mistake, how he regretted his actions, how he’d built himself into a better man because he knew he’d needed to do so, then she might have felt a wave of sympathy for him.

As it was, she felt angry, betrayed—and sad. So very sad. Who was this man she’d given herself to last night? She couldn’t forget the way he’d looked when he’d opened the guest-room door—lost and alone and almost terrified—but how did that mesh with who she now knew him to be?

“I did indeed,” he said, his voice cold and empty. “And I served my time for it, too.”

She wrapped her arms around herself. “Yet you keep it hidden. And you changed your name.”

A flash of anger did cross his features then. “Of course I did. I was a child, Lucilla, and I made a mistake. Is that supposed to follow me for the rest of my life?”

“But your father …” She felt many things for her own father, but not the kind of hate that could make her want to kill him. Never that. Disappointment and love and exasperation, yes.

His jaw was tight. “Just because a man makes a baby with a woman doesn’t mean he’s a father.”

“It also doesn’t mean he deserves what you did to yours.” Her voice was barely more than a whisper. It hurt to say such things to him, and yet she couldn’t understand how he could have done what the detective told her.

Nikos Stavrou spent four years in a juvenile-detention facility for attacking his father and nearly killing the man. No, the Stavrou home was not a happy one. The father was drunk and disorderly much of the time, and the police were often called out for domestic disturbances.

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